Friday, September 21, 2007

another foiled darwin award candidate.

Today's mind-bender: A MIT student is arrested for walking through Boston's Logan Airport with a "fake bomb" strapped to her chest.

Regardless of your position on the government's approach to fighting terrorism, one thing is pretty much a given. If you cannot understand that walking around a major airport with a contraption made of Play-Doh, wiring, and circuit board in plain sight on your chest can result in the premature cancellation of your birth certificate, you may want to get yourself sterilized and do us all the courtesy of not propagating your obviously defective genetic material.

Looks like the admission standards at MIT have dropped sharply in recent years. Of course, it could all just be a deliberate attempt to get publicity and provoke a police response, like Andrew "Don't Tase Me, Bro" Meyer's recent stunt at the Kerry Q&A. However, it's one thing to play "Zap the Douchebag" with campus police, and quite another to walk around with a Play-Doh bomb on your chest in an area that's crawling with jumpy cops who carry automatic weapons.

This is in Boston, where the cops shut down half the city over a Lite-Brite stuck to a bridge...you'd think a MIT sophomore would be smart enough to figure out that wearing a wired sweater and holding a nice big lump of Play-Doh in her hand wouldn't be the smartest thing to do at an airport.